American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Cupeño of Southern California exemplify forced removal of Indians from their homelands which has resulted in subsequent forced urbanization for many members of the band. My research, based on the oral history of one urban Cupeño family, traces this phenomenon. Tucked into a corner in the light industrial Huntington Park area of Los Angeles is an attractive residential street where four generations of women reside: Anna Dawn, a widowed great-grandmother, her daughter Patricia, Patricia's daughter Tracie, and Trade's baby daughter McKenna. These women are members of a small "Mission Indian" group, the Cupeño, who probably numbered between 500 and 750 at the time of contact in 1795 and who presently have a population of approximately 800. The history of the Dawn family, which has lived in the same area southeast of central Los Angeles for six generations, is quite different from that of the majority of Indians living in this city. At the time of the termination and relocation programs of in a massive migration to Los Angeles of Indians from all over the United States, the Dawn family had already been living in the city for three decades. The urbanization of the Dawns, as with other Mission Indian families, is the consequence of significant phenomena in California history: missionization and secularization, the accompanying dislocation from traditional lands, and the conversion from a direct relationship with the land to wage and subsistence labor.